This
morning I went over to my friend’s house to see two tiny foster kittens she got
yesterday. (They were spotted by a
passerby in a ditch near a street corner, their mother nowhere to be found, and
brought to the animal shelter; my friend is fostering them for a month until
they’re big enough to be adoptable. For
about forty-five minutes she, I, and her nine-year-old son crouched on the
floor and watched and commented on the kittens' every move: two tiny little fluffy things tottering
around on bow-legs, staring out at the new world through round blue alarmed
eyes. They’re excruciatingly, unbearably
cute: they have the super-power of
cuteness, as another friend’s son said about my cat when she was a
kitten.) Yesterday afternoon I took time
out from my day to make a pasta dish my friend told me was really good (it was good, even with tofu substituted for
chicken), and later today I’m going to stop whatever else I’m doing and clean
my bathroom. I’m happy that I’ve learned
how to harness my time to do those things -- peacefully, mindfully,
without guilt or rushing to get to them or through them. Happy that these days I actually do them.
I’ve been
harnessing time for a few years now, and one of many important things I’ve learned
from it is that the little things we do purely for pleasure, just for ourselves
– cook something new, go for a walk with friends, sit and sketch, take a nap –
matter a lot more than we usually think they do.
Time,
as I keep saying, is like the wind – an incredible resource we can use to
accomplish anything if we can harness it and use it for our own purposes instead
of walking into it or letting it blow us around. I harness time by consciously
deciding how I’m going to use the time I have every day, and by calling my time
partner (another friend of mine) and
telling her what my plan is. My friend
tells me her plan too, and we tell each other in detail how our days went
yesterday -- what did and didn’t go according to our plans.
It was through this
sharing that I learned what I know now about the importance of the little
things. I realize, of course, that I’m
not the first person to say that it’s the little things that count; it’s been
said so many times before it’s practically a self-help cliché. But it
wasn’t until I started planning my days and, in particular, hearing my friend’s
daily plans, that I felt the truth of it all the way down to my bones.
I love finding out
every single thing my friend plans to do today and what she did and didn’t do
yesterday – how she wants to use or did use her daily allotment of twenty-four
hours – but I’ve noticed that I really perk up whenever she says she’s going to
do one of those little, just-for-the-pleasure-of-it things. (I highly recommend doing daily harnessing
time check-ins with a friend; see Harnessing
Time with a Little Help from My Friend and With
a Little More Help from My Friend.)
Day after day,
I’ve noticed that I get a light, airy, open, happy feeling whenever my friend
tells me she’s going to do some little thing just for herself, and through that
noticing I’ve come to see, to really believe, that those things are not just
merely fun, not just guilty little pleasures, distractions from the real urgent
necessary work of the day – they’re important. They redeem us and spiritually feed us; they
might even be what we remember when we look back on our weeks, months, years,
lives.
(Will I remember this a month from now? I try to ask myself that whenever I’m in a
twist over something, and almost invariably the answer is no.)
For a while, about
ten years ago, I made two lists in a notebook at the end of every day; on one
list I wrote ten things I was grateful for or that went well that day and on
the other I wrote ten things I felt bad about.
It turned out that the things that were going right in my life were almost
exclusively big and enduring, whereas the things that were going wrong were all
stuff that wouldn’t matter in a day or so -- in a month at the most. And yet the bad stuff was what I was focusing
on, if not outright consumed by; it was commanding almost all of my attention
on any given day.
And I sort of
think that when we focus on what we have
to do instead of what we want to do,
something similar is going on.
I have this theory
that when we’re really, really busy – feeling totally overwhelmed by everything
we have to do – there’s a good chance
that we’re doing something, maybe a whole bunch of somethings, maybe even
everything, not really for our own sakes but because we think someone else
wants or needs us to do them. We feel
like we have to do those things
because someone else will… suffer, get mad, be disappointed, fire us, reject
us, think badly of us, not give us what we want (choose one of the above or
make up some more). (And for more about
this idea See
The People-Pleasing Trap.) When I
was writing down all the bad things that were bothering me, most of them had to
do with other people too: someone was
mad at me, or some potential boyfriend had abandoned me, or something I had
written was being rejected by someone, et cetera.
All of this is
leading up to why, I think, doing those little things that are good for us and
only us, feels so good. And maybe why
doing everything we have to do feels
so bad, or at the very least urgent, hectic, and un-fun.
I’m not suggesting
that we all toss aside our obligations and just do whatever we want all the
time. Most of us couldn’t do that even
if we wanted to; there are people, places and things in our lives that require
our attention, we need to have jobs and do them effectively in order to
survive. And even if we do have all our
time to do whatever we want whenever we want, as I did for a while, sort of,
when I had money from a book contract and nothing else I had to do but write, we
can still manage to feel overwhelmed with everything we ought and need to do; when
I had all my time at my own disposal I worried constantly about whether I was writing
long enough, whether I should be doing more to clean my hour, fix my house,
etc. It was as if I was trying to make
myself stay busy, and feel busy, because if I didn’t I felt guilty.
So that’s the
bottom line, I guess. It’s all about
attitude, all about what we do inside our heads, whether we’re the busiest
person in the world or someone with absolutely nothing we have to do. That’s great news because we can work on
changing our attitudes. And in the
meantime there are some simple easy measures we take that in and of themselves
might change our attitudes. We can look
at how we’re going to spend our day today and decide to throw in one or two
little things we want to do instead of feel like we have to do. Things like reading a novel, hanging out for
a while doing nothing, going to a friend’s house to play with some
kittens. And when the urge comes to toss
those things aside because it turns out we’re just too busy to do them, we can
ignore that urge, do whatever nice thing we planned, and see what happens. Maybe nothing bad will happen if we take a
little time off and do something fun just for the hell of it. In fact, more than likely something good will
happen.
And maybe, just
maybe, it will turn out that we do have time for ourselves after all.
--
Mary Allen
